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John McEnroe Is Still Pretty Complicated

ON A LATE MORNING IN EARLY JUNE, John McEnroe was back in New York from the French Open in Paris, where, in the dramatically hushed tones favored by tennis broadcasters, he told his American television audience that the No. 2 player in the world, Rafael Nadal, had first “befuddled” and then become a “nightmare” for No. 1 Roger Federer in Nadal’s straight-sets victory. Now, sitting in the Midtown Manhattan conference room of his new accountant, McEnroe was explaining in an animated way why talking about tennis is easier for him than playing was in the early 1980s, when he was at the top of his game, an artist with a wooden racket. “I was always fighting the establishment, trying to run through brick walls,” he said. “I don’t have the angst I had.” As he spoke, you almost believed him, almost wanted to congratulate him for transforming himself from the world’s most notoriously — in a favorite McEnroe locution — unglued athlete, for putting aside his near-obsessive belief that everyone — especially journalists — was persecuting him, for enduring the slings and syringes of his serially self-destructing ex-wife Tatum O’Neal, to confront turning 50 as an affably adjusted icon with a long and happy second marriage, six kids, a rock band of boyhood friends with whom he can play Led Zeppelin covers on weekends and a celebrated press badge around his neck.

But then there were all the other things he’d been saying, sitting there wire-fox-lean and restless, his whole body seeming to dilate with pulses of nervous energy, the old combustive spew of light brown curls now a close, off-white cloud cover, the voice still Queensy after all these years, his blue Cons on and off the long, polished table as certified-looking men in shapeless suits strode back and forth in the hallway outside. (McEnroe, who, say what you will, has always been all about accountability, says that only after his former numbers men of 10 years “dropped the ball” several times did he let them go.) “I am,” he’d just confessed, “someone who gets pretty worked up.” It was that way in Paris, where he was “sweaty and stressed,” and also “melancholy.” For McEnroe, big tennis tournaments have the feel of class reunions, and day after French day passed with McEnroe thinking, God, I haven’t seen my friends. I wanted to get together with the boys. I was wondering, Are they really my friends? I was bummed out.”

Then he ran into Bjorn Borg, his great rival and the only player of stature with whom “I never had a problem on or off the court,” and he thought afterward, “I should do more with Bjorn!” He also encountered another contemporary, the Frenchman Yannick Noah, which left McEnroe feeling complicated. Noah was a vastly inferior player to McEnroe, but McEnroe was choosing to regard tennis as his Pyrrhic victory in their long game of life because Noah has sired more successful athletic offspring — his firstborn, Joakim, is a Chicago Bulls power forward; no McEnroe child has played more than an indifferent year of college tennis — and Noah is a European pop star. “His son’s in the N.B.A.!” McEnroe exclaimed. “I thought, That’s amazing! Yannick is selling millions of records! I thought, Jeez! Part of me is happy for him, part of me wonders, Why am I such a bad singer?! Then I thought, It’s great to see him! I go through all these emotions. I was happy for two days, and then I was worrying again about my wife, who came over, and I had to take her to the Eiffel Tower. I thought, I’m not a tourist!” But in the end, McEnroe arrived at a happy perspective both because his wife, the singer Patty Smyth, is a deft rallying partner for her husband of 11 years when he becomes, as she says, “a negatron,” and because, McEnroe noticed, “it’s quite a view up there.”

After Paris, McEnroe’s next professional vantage was the Wimbledon broadcast booth, a tiny scuba mask of a room set just below the player’s family box and nestled so close to the base line at Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis Club that the players float by the window like morays and barracuda. McEnroe, however, may be the biggest fish. He is such a charismatic commentator that more than any player he remains the face of tennis. It’s McEnroe who is still making the lush commercials, appearing on the late-night talk shows and wearing pegged suits to the swank benefits. “Johnny Mac is almost bigger than his sport,” says Christopher Russo, the tennis-crazed former co-host of the “Mike and the Mad Dog” sports-radio talk show. “The average fan watches because Mac’s involved.”

For people who remember the McEnroe of the early 1980s, this is a new turn on an old phrase. As a player, McEnroe was mesmerizing for the contrast between the gorgeous, uplifting way he played tennis and the lower kind of man he seemed to be, a carping, bullying, tactless, moody, bitter, confused, clueless, selfish jerk — these only a few of the ways Sports Illustrated described him. Few athletes have been loathed like McEnroe — especially by reporters. Now, however, there is cheering for him in the press box. Mike Greenberg, of ESPN’s sports-radio talk show “Mike and Mike,” says, “Of all the analysts working in any sport, he’s as good as any of them.” Jeff Van Gundy, who analyzed the N.B.A. finals for ABC, says McEnroe is “outstanding,” praising him because he is “honest, direct . . . and has compassion.” The Fox baseball commentator Tim McCarver likes that “he’s frank to the point where you kind of look at the television and say, ‘Did he just say that?!’ ” Another baseball analyst, ESPN’s Joe Morgan, is admiring enough of McEnroe and his game that he has been called “McMorgan.” Tennis, says Morgan, “is about the will, and when Mac does a match, I learn who has the will.”

McEnroe works as a commentator only six to eight prime weeks a year, an annual verbal migration from Paris to London to New York spent analyzing the tennis “majors” — the fourth is the Australian Open in January — part of a broadcast team that usually features smooth-as-cream play-by-play man Ted Robinson and Mary Carillo, who grew up with McEnroe in Douglaston, Queens, and delights in giving her old boy-next-door the strawberry. McEnroe has been broadcasting for 16 years, and his thinking in restricting his workload amounts to an unwillingness “to take it that seriously.” He says he is apprehensive about how susceptible he is to both “stress” and to “regret.” “Look what happened to poor Tim Russert,” he told me in London. “They suck you in, make you feel you have to do more and more, and maybe it was just a fluke with him, but I saw the guy do the North Carolina primary, the ‘Today’ show, Imus, MSNBC, and I am wary of that kind of commitment. If you’re good, you try so hard, like Russert, and the guy drops dead at 58.” There is also McEnroe’s feeling that his is a vocation with creative limitations: “How many times can you say, ‘That guy hit a good forehand’?!”

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John McEnroeCredit
Justin Stephens

It’s just this kind of quirky candor that is appreciated by his audience. As a broadcaster, McEnroe is far from lyrical. He operates in plain-spoken language that features banal intensifiers like “outstanding” and “phenomenal,” and whenever he’s between a rock and a hard place, he reaches for a cliché. The uninspired phrases have made some media critics dubious — Slate’s Mike Steinberger called him “an insufferable blowhard” — but McEnroe’s strengths are like those of Theodore Dreiser, who wrote wooden sentences but understood characters, emotion and story line. McEnroe’s best character is, of course, McEnroe, and much of the fun for listeners is analyzing the analyst. On the air, as in life, he remains a beguiling combination of the confessional and the elusive, an enigma even to his wife, who says that her husband is “really complicated and really simple. He’s such an interesting puzzle for me to work on.” McEnroe has an ability to make powerful, provocative remarks, (“Of all the presidents I ever met, the least impressive was Mugabe”) and then, like a water bug, skim onto the next shimmering destination; he’s enticing, yet slippery. In the stream-of-consciousness level of dialogue necessitated by broadcasting live television, this is a very effective way to be. That McEnroe doesn’t seem to hold anything back, sounding prickly if he’s feeling prickly, drolly bringing up the lingering pain of his old losses, expressing an empathy for every kind of competitor except those who fail to at all times “dig deep,” are what make him a lot more interesting than the Andy Roddicks and James Blakes of the tennis world. McEnroe says his “vow” as a broadcaster is “giving people an idea of what it’s like to be out there.” Somehow, all these years later, he remains a competitor in the booth.

The reverse could have been said about McEnroe the player, that he was a broadcaster on the court. The tantrums and the boorish epithets he lobbed at fans, opponents and, especially, umpires sometimes obscured not only the innovative subtleties of his game but also the way his play suggested a sophisticated moment-to-moment processing of whom he was up against. That was never truer than at Wimbledon. McEnroe became famous there in 1977, reaching the semifinals as a brazen teenaged qualifier with pouty cheeks and a terry-cloth headband. Three years later he and Borg staged a championship that has become one of those seminal public events about which people can say exactly where they were when they saw it. (Nelson Mandela told McEnroe he listened in prison on Robben Island.) McEnroe served and volleyed as Borg stood stoic at the base line contesting points so complex and involved they felt like short stories. The best moments came at the end, a 34-point fourth set tiebreaker, won by McEnroe, followed by a 8-6 fifth-set loss so thrillingly close that Borg’s fifth consecutive Wimbledon victory spoke to the brutal, bright-size-life way that singles tennis has of revealing a man and displaying what he is made of. It is a martial game: eliminate or be eliminated.

Something about the vulnerability McEnroe exposed in Borg seemed to carry over to the next year, when they met again and this time McEnroe prevailed, replacing Borg as No. 1. Afterward, with a flourish of insight, McEnroe described how he ended Borg’s streak, detailing the various tells that revealed Borg’s relative levels of fatigue; McEnroe’s own consternating impulse to let up himself when Borg began to tire; and Borg’s curious self-doubt during tiebreakers, a sudden absence of confidence with his serve that left him as soon as a new set began. What McEnroe couldn’t know then was that such pure gladiatorial theater would not soon be repeated.

It’s distressing to McEnroe that when he looks out at tennis today he sees a game in trouble. Tennis has been in decline for years, a pale, pedigreed antique in an America that has embraced golf, reimagining the back nine as the leisure station of the everyman. McEnroe’s famous temper rises as he describes golf as a kind of athletic grifter preying upon society’s most “sedentary and lazy” impulses at the cost of something higher. The avatar of golf’s rise has, of course, been Tiger Woods, whose virtuoso skills and what McEnroe calls “the magnetic aura you feel around him” have allowed Woods to become the sporting symbol for a time when tennis has been devoid of such stirring on-court personality until perhaps now. Embedded in McEnroe’s enthusiasm for Roger Federer’s rivalry with Rafael Nadal is his desire to defer to them for the good of a sport about which, in his youth, he created a histrionic public drama of ambivalence, but now, as an older man, he says he has finally come to cherish.

In his 20s, McEnroe’s relationship to tennis had similarities to the way many immature men feel about love — he was awhirl with conflicted emotions and felt too unresolved about himself to commit his feelings. McEnroe says that back then he felt besieged and alienated. “No other athlete in any sport has ever had to go through what I have to,” he lamented in 1986, the year he married O’Neal. Yet he was, in fact, very much like the baseball player Ted Williams, the so-called greatest “natural hitter” the sport ever saw and a surly, high-strung figure inflamed with a sense of the world’s injustice, which led to crude displays of spitting, screaming, bat-throwing and primal dances of profane rage. Why was McEnroe ticked? “Bad calls; not getting what I wanted; being a perfectionist; wanting everything just right; people who had no idea what they were clapping for; wanting to change the system. Tennis was a white, upper-class sport, and I wanted it to be treated like other sports were.” All this disgust fed the crass behavior that was repellent to many people’s ideas of proper sportsmanship. McEnroe, for his part, always made clear his contempt for journalists and then seemed incredulous when they skewered him. He can still catalog the hurts. Even today, as a journalist himself, McEnroe seems to make it a point of pride to be peevish with reporters; there is a purity to his recalcitrance.

Yet, again like Williams, who looked up so frequently at the press box he failed to notice that the grandstand adored him, the obvious emotional integrity of a gifted man who experienced life as such struggle drew many fans to McEnroe. For a lot of younger people, especially, the McEnroe out there raging and smashing rackets could express all the displeasure at bad things in the world that they were too inhibited to disclose — a disaffection that was the sporting analogue to the seething lyrics and splintered guitars of the new-wave English rockers like Elvis Costello and the Clash. “I was lonely,” he says, “because it’s hard to be given credit for having mixed feelings about something your friends would think it was inexplicable not to feel it was all amazing. In my old weird way, my ex-wife made sense. She’d been through a lot, and I thought she’d understand what I was going through. Obviously you shouldn’t get together for that reason.” He and O’Neal separated in 1992. Five years later, McEnroe was remarried, to Smyth, a fellow New Yorker who sang “Goodbye to You” as lead singer of the rock band Scandal. “Tennis players shouldn’t get married,” she says. “It hurts your game. When you’re done you can get married. The thing with John, the world opened up to him from tennis.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that, his time on the tennis tour behind him, the two careers McEnroe pursued were rock ’n’ roll and journalism, and the latter profession is the one that took. “I’ve done everything I said I’d never do,” he admits.

It turned out that the young McEnroe who seemed heedlessly capable of acting out upon every jagged impulse was also hiding something. “He definitely cares what people think,” Smyth says. “He definitely gets wounded. He just doesn’t ever let what people think dictate what he does.” Given all this, for McEnroe a gratifying aspect of being a commentator is that “it allows another side of my personality to come through that’s maybe not as serious about myself as I seemed when I was playing.” He’s still mercurial, a man whose moods — one moment he’s warm, 10 minutes later he’s coldly dismissive — blow in and out like the London weather, but there’s also a more accessible self-reflection. “Look at Federer,” McEnroe says. “He just seems to love it more than I did. I wasn’t able to appreciate loving the game as much as I should have.”

One reason McEnroe may, as he says, feel less anxiety and dismay out in the world is that his sources of anxiety and dismay are now external. It’s no longer about him; it’s about tennis. Rehabilitating what he refers to as “our game” has become a mission to him. What McEnroe observes when he looks at Federer and Nadal are two players both supremely talented as athletes and as people. At times McEnroe can seem disarmed by their ability to mesh competitive passion with unwavering personal dignity: Federer is so elegant and gracious; Nadal, so earnestly humble. Federer, who is 27, is the winner of 12 tennis majors and was the top-ranked player in tennis from early 2004 until this month, dominating the game for a record number of consecutive weeks. Many experts, including McEnroe, have called him the best hard-surface player in history. But France holds its tennis trials on the courts of clay preferred by Nadal, a fleet and indefatigable 22-year-old Spaniard whose acclaimed posterior and biceps are flaunted by his trademark piratas Capri pants and sleeveless jersey as he runs the base line like a strong safety. Nadal’s June victory was his fourth consecutive French Open title. To that point he seemed to be a specialist, a lesser man once his feet left clay.

What stirred McEnroe about Paris was the way he said the Basel-born Federer, his classic strokes usually relentless as Swiss time, was left “just shaking his head,” utterly deprived of his self-possession. He also knew that while Federer defeated Nadal last year on the brisk grass at Wimbledon, Nadal pushed him hard before falling in five sets. McEnroe’s belief as a broadcaster is that “when it’s a great match you pull back” and say less, and only as that competition ended did the full McEnroe exuberance emerge as he pronounced it “one of the all-time matches that I’ve seen here.” In New York, in June, as McEnroe thought ahead to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, which begins Aug. 25, he was telling everyone who would listen that he sensed familiar epic possibilities for the kinetic pair. As for Federer, McEnroe detected a ravening scent of peril in the air.

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At Wimbledon McEnroe was driven around London in a black Chrysler 300C to a procession of meet-and-greets and speaking engagements where “they throw me a little money”; to dinners with pals like Boris Becker, whose mother made them Wiener schnitzel; to workouts at the gym that have made him leaner than he was as a player; to sessions of smacking tennis balls with his old doubles partner Peter Fleming “I hit regularly so I don’t lose sight of how difficult it is”; to a rapturous old-home-week encounter with Michael Stich, who proposed teaming up next year in the over-35 Wimbledon doubles bracket everyone still wants to play doubles with McEnroe, such a legendary partner that Fleming once defined the best doubles team of all time as “McEnroe and anyone else.” All the while, McEnroe was eating handfuls of Gummy Bears and stretching his aching back “my body’s falling apart” and of course logging 10 hours a day talking about tennis for NBC, the BBC and all the other impromptu press-room microphones extended toward him by hands from across the world, who always grab as big a bite of Mac as they can get. Through each day he was on edge, twitchy, grudgingly accommodating and impatient to be onto something else, as long as it wasn’t downtime. “I’ve got to do something,” he said while vibrating in and out of a greenroom easy chair on Wimbledon’s second Thursday. “It seems unacceptable to be doing nothing.”

McEnroe is also the first to admit that “I’m not mellow, I’m mellower,” which means, says his wife, “he’s an affectionate guy, a happy guy and man can he get freaking angry.” This is to say that McEnroe’s encounters with meter maids and state troopers take more out of him than they do most people. “He never goes off on meter maids,” Smyth says. “He just ices them. It’s the worst. You don’t want that wind blowing your way.” When can’t he hold back? “Traffic jams,” she says thinly.

One London evening, with Federer and Nadal progressing steadily through their brackets, McEnroe was slumped in the 300C, red-eyed and quiet as the car sped beside the moonlit Thames, past the garish hot pinks and greens of the Millennium Wheel to Room by the River, an enormous white marquee. Inside, Londoners in long gowns and dark suits were watching an after-dinner film-screen replay of the 1980 McEnroe-Borg tiebreaker as they awaited what they really paid 200 pounds each to see McEnroe and Borg onstage together talking about tennis. McEnroe says he avoids footage of the fabled 1980 match because memory is so fragile, so easily stripped or altered, and film is such a powerful appropriator of private experience. “I never watch it,” he said. “You always envision something bigger and better. The winners we hit! Then you see all the mistakes. It felt magical. I wanted it to stay magical.”

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Well, Maybe Next Year
McEnroe finally succumbed to Borg, 6-8 in the fifth, but would beat Borg in the final in 1981 (and win the title again in 1983 and 1984).Credit
Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images

But the crowd was transfixed, and then on their feet as Borg, tanned like a skier, and McEnroe, his complexion skim-milky, embraced in front of them. McEnroe, suddenly aglow and looking boyish, thanked the projectionist for not showing the fifth set so people could think “I won that match!” before mocking the slurs bellowed out by a drunk trying to incite him to lose his glue — “at least say, ‘You cannot be serious!’ ” Then everything devolved into “a lovefest,” said McEnroe, who gushed lengthily about what a delightful person Borg was in contrast to, say, Jimmy Connors, who “despite the fact that he was a complete [expletive] I had complete respect for because no matter how hard I’m trying, he’s trying harder.” And how fab a fellow was Borg in contrast to the street-fighting Mac? On McEnroe’s first trip to Ireland in his early 20s, he finally met his great-aunt Molly, who greeted him with, “I always liked Bjorn Borg better than you.” Looking at Borg, he inquired, “Ever feel like throwing your racket and losing your mind?” and Borg replied, “Only once in my life.” Something about lousy calls and an opponent named McEnroe. An audience member asked McEnroe how O’Neal was doing since her recent arrest in New York for buying crack cocaine. “I’m not exactly sure,” he replied. Though O’Neal has been in drug rehab many times and through the years has accused him of all manner of marital sins, Smyth says McEnroe never speaks harshly of his ex. Now he added, “Given that she’s the mother of three of my children, I want her to be doing well.”

Back in the car McEnroe was chipper. He confessed of his youthful temper: “I could have controlled it better. My parents always thought so. On some level I didn’t control it because I didn’t want to. But I took economics at Stanford, and it’s the law of diminishing returns. I did feel out of control, and I didn’t like it. Maybe what I like so much about what I do now is that I’m in control.” Then he was talking about the match with Borg again, making a tennis rivalry sound like a very public private relationship in which defeats are inseparable from victories, part of an accumulating intimacy with your opponent.

Twelve hours later, there was McEnroe on the base line of a practice court confronting tennis balls zooming at him in parboiled parabolas of spin. Nadal had invited McEnroe to warm him up for his semifinal match with Rainer Schuttler. It’s not every former competitor who can step out of the booth to back-and-forth it with the current champions — imagine today’s McCarver catching Mariano Rivera’s cut fastball or Joe Morgan trying to hit it, but McEnroe, living the sportsman’s immortal daydream, has never officially retired. He still wins senior tour tournaments and is a member of the World Team Tennis New York Sportimes, where his old self returns just frequently enough that his younger brother Patrick, also a retired professional tennis player and now a fine broadcaster for ESPN, calls the little tempests “a shtick.” But this session with Nadal was special. Nadal is 27 years younger, with arms the size of McEnroe’s calves, and as McEnroe would say, “He plays harder in practice than most guys do in a match.” Once they began points, Nadal planted English peas from corner to corner with such ballistic pace you worried about the aging southpaw across the net. “He can’t hit with this kid,” yelled a straw-hatted woman from the packed gallery. McEnroe himself played along, shaking his head as he called out, “What am I supposed to do?!” But as McEnroe said later, “I can still play well enough to give them what they need,” for the cunning strokes are intact, if not the anaerobic bursts of movement. Soon, with the signature cantilevered serve — he goes down then up, like a pump-jack in an oil field — the near-absence of backswing and the flickering hands at net, he found his flow, creating rallies with each shot different from the next, winning points, one with a volley feather-dusted so perfectly that Nadal cracked up as the woman’s husband boomed, “Still got it mate!” After close to an hour, Nadal had had enough, but McEnroe called, “One more!” and Nadal obliged, after which McEnroe walked toward the net, saying, “Don’t want to tire you out!”

On Sunday, when Federer again faced Nadal, McEnroe began his morning at a corporate brunch organized by the 1972 Wimbledon champion Stan Smith, whom McEnroe owes for life because the first girl he kissed was Smith’s wife’s youngest sister. In a backyard among geraniums and clinking Champagne glasses, McEnroe diagnosed Federer’s “stubbornness,” Nadal’s “heavy ball” and his own children’s “affluenza.” Then, back at Wimbledon, in the booth alongside Robinson, he looked out at many purple-and-green-striped umbrellas. It rained. It stopped. Federer came out “tight ... he’s human,” McEnroe said, amid loosing comments like “that was pretty much butchered by Federer.” Nadal won two sets. It rained again for more than an hour, leaving McEnroe and Robinson to pass the time off air trading old Marv Albert lines from his days broadcasting for the Rangers and the Knicks. McEnroe: “Kick save and a beauty by Giacomin!” Robinson: “DeBusschere to Bradley to Reed and one!”

The rain stopped. McEnroe described confidence regained as Federer won a close third set in a tiebreaker. Federer won the fourth set in another tiebreaker, a taut, vivid display in which Federer saved two match points. A much-anticipated event was transcending expectations. McEnroe said less and less, letting the event take over. Four games into the climaxing fifth set, the rains came again, a situation McEnroe called “unbelievably sad.” In the booth, karaoke and babies were discussed until play resumed. This was the longest Wimbledon final in history, and by now Robinson and McEnroe had been in the tiny room for more than seven hours. It smelled bad. McEnroe was eating boiled potatoes with his hands. Back and forth the play went, Federer and Nadal trading games, trading impossible returns, the sky darkening into a lavender evening wash, McEnroe noting that neither man looked remotely tired, until at last Federer began to make crucial mistakes and suddenly Nadal was serving with match point at 8-7. McEnroe kept silent. Was he subdued at this exhilarating moment? Later he would say that a small part of him was missing his children. Federer slapped an easy forehand into the net. Nadal had won. He sprinted into the stands, climbed on top of the booth, his knees brushing the window in front of McEnroe’s face as the new champion sought out his family. McEnroe exhaled. “Gotta be the greatest match we’ve ever ... seen,” he said.

Moments later he interviewed both teary-eyed players, repeating his “greatest ever” evaluation, issuing hugs, looking as overwhelmed as they did and completely exhausted. “If this doesn’t spark interest in our sport, I don’t know what will,” he told his audience. Then McEnroe learned that back in New York, NBC wanted him to stay longer so the network could film 90 seconds of match summary from him and Robinson for prime time. “You’ve got to be joking,” McEnroe said, and rage rippled through him like a fallen wire. He raised his middle finger to the messenger and disappeared. “That’s what’s so great about him, he gets so emotional,” Robinson whispered gamely. It was reported that “John’s disappeared,” and all available NBC runners were dispatched to find him. According to Patrick McEnroe, who spent childhood evenings in the garage learning to ignore the paddles John smashed against the wall when Patrick beat him at Ping-Pong: “Part of him enjoys chaos. He likes things to be a little unsettled. Wreaking havoc, what unsettles others, he can handle.” Eventually McEnroe returned, did a flawless minute and a half and departed.

The black 300C was soon caught in a traffic jam. Did McEnroe truly think it was the greatest tennis match ever played? Better even than his own with Borg? “There’s an emotional similarity,” he said. He was obviously still in the grip of tremendous feeling. In the coming weeks he would repeat the claim over and over. Here in the car, seated beside someone who saw both matches and did not agree with him, there was the sense that McEnroe didn’t think so, either, but was never going to admit it, that he was forfeiting his legacy for the good of tennis. Suddenly McEnroe was lamenting the traffic. To his driver he suggested tightly, “Charlie, you ever make that right up there?” Charlie knew a back route. Soon only a single blue car blocked the 300C’s way. McEnroe’s face contorted. “What is this idiot doing?” he screamed at the blue car. He began fulminating about having been asked for “more! more! more!” until suddenly the window was rolling down and he was screaming at the blue car: “You ever driven before, mate? Jesus-God-Almighty!” The window went back up. “This is discouraging,” he said. And then it all passed. He smiled, and imitating Howard Cosell, he said, “This is where McEnroe’s patience is starting to wear thin!” Then, in his own voice, he said: “I was getting there. Had to regroup!”

Correction: September 7, 2008

An article on Aug. 24 about John McEnroe misspelled the location of the prison where Nelson Mandela was jailed when he listened to the 1980 Wimbledon final, between McEnroe and Bjorn Borg. It is Robben Island, not Robin.

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of four books, most recently “The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM24 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: In his second life as tennis’s premier commentator, he is: A] IN CONTROL; B] WORKED UP; C] MELLOWER; D] STRESSED; E] ALL OF THE ABOVE. Today's Paper|Subscribe